20240520 UPDATE: I just ran winupdate on an ancient win10 surface and after the same 643 error two more times, and running through all the available updates, it’s now reporting I’m up to date. yippee.
I guess the latest update finally fixed it, at least on the Surface.

Anyone tried and succeeded? Not too awful plodding through the resizing? Tips to avoid destroying a partition and having to reinstall the os?

  • Thurstylark@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Waow. MS can’t decide if their users should have control of their hardware or not.

    Your linux bootloader and efi config? That belongs to Windows, and it will make changes as much as it wants. A recovery partition that has no usefulness outside their own ecosystem? Yeah, they know it’s fucked, and they fucked it, but it’s your computer, you fix it!

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      Not dickriding microsoft here, but they have provided all the tools to fix this. They just can’t make them happen automatically on effected machines because they broke something particularly complicated.

      You need to have enough space to resolve the issue (which was caused by not having enough space in the recovery partition in the first place). You need to adjust the size of the parition (traditionally a risky operation, especially through Windows). You then need to download a specific update while skipping another, install, and reboot.

      They have provided scripts for backing up the recovery partition, expanding it, and restoring the contents from backup if expanding fucks the contents. They have provided a script to download and install the specific update to fix the problem once you have enough space in that paritition. They did not automate restarting the computer (piss easy to automate), or to hide the problematic update (easy through UI, probably a pain to script).

      • Thurstylark@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        I agree that if there was enough space in the recovery partition to begin with, this wouldn’t be a problem, but the user isn’t the party that specified that size or the party that decided to add enough stuff to the recovery partition to exceed that spec.

        MS knows that this is a widely-deployed configuration (they deployed it), but they’re going ahead with an automatic update that is incompatible with that configuration anyway, failing to communicate to the user why the failure occurred, and refusing to automate a fix to the thing their automation broke in the first place.

  • N3Cr0@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    A recovery environment is overrated under Windows. Just backup your files and reinstall from scratch.

    • Crackhappy@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I’ve been using windows since windows 3. The number of times I’ve used the “recovery” feature is exactly zero.

      Edit: Corrected by another user below. I have used it a couple times for update rollbacks, I just haven’t used it for a full recovery. When I’ve run into serious issues I just reload it from scratch, as I keep data and OS on completely separate drives.

      • subignition@fedia.io
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        7 months ago

        Lucky for you! Twice over the years I have had Windows 10, the system failed to come back up after a windows update and the ability to uninstall the most recent update through the recovery partition saved me.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      It’s more than strictly a recovery partition. It is also used for updates and the files needed to roll individual ones back. The entire issue was that they had an update that didn’t properly handle when there wasn’t enough space for it in the recovery partition.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Yeah, I have it turned off on all my machines (mostly because of that vulnerability a few months ago).

      I have never been in a situation where it was useful, nor have I ever had it work when I tried it.

  • claytonburns@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I have run the script with mostly success. A few computers had the script fail because WinRE was corrupt, or missing, or whatever. You would think that if WinRE wasn’t present, the update would be skipped and not repeatedly notify you that it failed, but that’s Microsoft for you.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
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    7 months ago

    I have done this multiple times on servers. It’s beyond simple and doesn’t take but a few minutes. Follow the instuctions and you’re gold.

    Edit: In short, you use diskpart to resize the boot partition down, then use diskpart again to resize the recovery partition up with the space you created in step one.

  • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I was able to fix it using a free open source download called “Mint”. In fact, Mint permanently solved all of my Windows problems!

  • shundi82@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    I’d done this some time ago via console.

    My RE partition had sat before my main partition - and since you can’t shrink partitions at their start (left) with fdisk and I didn’t want to boot up a Linux pen drive, I just shrank the main partition at its end (right) and moved my RE partition to the now freed space at the end.

    I’ve made the old RE partition available, but since it’s just a few hundred MB, I doubt I’ll ever actually use it. :-P

    PS: If you do it via fdisk, just make sure you first enable the new RE before disabling the old RE. Otherwise there’s nothing that can be copied to the new RE - I’ve made that mistake and had to get the missing files from a Windows ISO.

  • SharkAttak@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    My recovery doesn’t work and I don’t know why and since when, so it’s a sorta of non issue for me.

  • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I did this ages ago now. Was a non-issue.

    Edit: To clarify, I’m not endorsing MS on not fixing this. Just saying I did it and had no issues.